Exclusive: President Obama Considered Putting Osama bin Laden on Trial if Taken Alive

In an adaptation from his new book, The Finish—first reported for Vanity Fair—magazine contributing editor Mark Bowden reveals that President Obama intended to put Osama bin Laden on trial in the federal court system if he had been captured, rather than killed, during the Abbottabad raid. Bowden had access to key players including top national-security officials and the president himself.

According to Bowden in the story—in November’s Vanity Fair—in the unlikely event that bin Laden surrendered, Obama saw an opportunity to resurrect the idea of a criminal trial, which Attorney General Eric Holder had planned for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. This time, the president tells Bowden, he was prepared to bring bin Laden back and put him on trial in a federal court. “We worked through the legal and political issues that would have been involved, and Congress and the desire to send him to Guantánamo, and to not try him, and Article III.” Obama continues: “I mean, we had worked through a whole bunch of those scenarios. But, frankly, my belief was if we had captured him, that I would be in a pretty strong position, politically, here, to argue that displaying due process and rule of law would be our best weapon against al-Qaeda, in preventing him from appearing as a martyr.”

President Obama tells Bowden that he was aware of the possibility that “The Pacer”—as the team called the figure captured on surveillance video regularly walking around the Abbottabad compound’s vegetable garden—“was some warlord from Afghanistan who had set up shop, the possibility that this was a drug dealer from the Gulf who valued his privacy or had a mistress or a second family.” He also understood that The Pacer might be exactly who they thought he was. Obama had never bought the line that bin Laden “was living an ascetic life somewhere, in some mountain somewhere.”

Bowden describes Situation Room meetings where the team presented the president with wildly varying odds. “People don’t have differences because they have different intel,” Morell, who had been personally involved in the flawed analysis of Saddam’s weapons capability, explains. “We are all looking at the same things. I think it depends more on your past experience.” He continues: “If we had a human source who had told us directly that bin Laden was living in that compound, I still wouldn’t be above 60 percent. And I’m telling you, the case for W.M.D. wasn’t just stronger—it was much stronger.” As Bowden reports, Obama’s conclusion was that the odds were 50-50. “This is a flip of the coin. You guys, I can’t base this decision on the notion that we have any greater certainty than that,” the president said.

“I can tell you that we can succeed on the raid,” Admiral William McRaven said in one meeting. “What I can’t tell you yet is how I get in and how I get out. To do that requires detailed planning by air planners who do this for a living. . . . Getting out could be a little sporty. I can’t recommend a raid until I do the homework.” According to Bowden, the president told McRaven to start rehearsing that option. One big advantage of a raid was that they would know for sure if bin Laden had been killed. The president recalls another: “There might be the possibility that we would get enough intelligence out of the compound, even in a very short operation, that would help us dismantle other portions of the organization.”

Bowden contradicts reports that many of the president’s top advisers opposed the raid. “Nearly everyone present favored it,” he writes. “The only major dissenters were Biden and Gates, and before the raid was launched, Gates would change his mind.” According to Bowden, Leon Panetta told Obama that he ought to ask himself this question: “What would the average American say if he knew we had the best chance of getting bin Laden since Tora Bora and we didn’t take a shot?”

“It was a matter of taking one last breath and just making sure, asking is there something that I haven’t thought of?” Obama tells Bowden of the last moments before the plan was carried out. “Is there something that we need to do? . . . At that point my estimation was that we weren’t going to be able to do it better a month or two months or three months from now. We weren’t going to have better certainty about whether bin Laden was there, and so it was just a matter of pulling the trigger.” In the ends he tells Bowden that it all boiled down to his deep confidence in McRaven. “He just never looks like he’s surprised by anything,” the president says.